An Evening with Patrick Melrose or why the worse thing that ever happened to me was that I wasn’t an orphan.

Saturday evening in Mazamet. June 9th. The weather is mild. There’s a street party in the centre of town. From the garden we can hear music in the distance. For dinner I made pasta con le sarde, which we both love – although I’ve felt slightly uneasy about loving it ever since Justice Scalia said in an interview it was his favourite dish. The man could ruin anything for me, even food.

I read Edward St. Aubyn many years ago, in my early 20’s. Very little of it registered. I was in denial mode then. Survival mode?

Episode two. They’re in Lacoste. That’s in the Vaucluse, a three and a half hour drive east of us. I remember from the book he was physically abused, this is the theme of the episode. I was not physically abused. The rest however is very familiar. Contempt, resentment. Arguments that would have horrified Albee’s George and Martha. In our house there was also much screaming. An inordinate amount of screaming. Much of it from me. At one point I feel like stopping the television and screaming at Patrick. Fight, boy. Scream! The father apparently can’t stand the child yet feels the impulse to spend time with him. I remember that very vividly. In part because it never really ended. Every year I still get letters or notes on my birthday from both my parents. Both! I imagine they feel they haven’t done enough to make me hate myself already. And as neither has accomplished much in their lives, perhaps they feel this is the one thing they might still be able to do successfully if they just try hard enough.

One of my father’s favourite lines was “this boy’s problem is he wasn’t beaten enough.” Yes, certainly. How insightful. Psychologists often recommend physical violence as a solution to all sorts of problems.

The dinner table scene is excruciating. The mother wants to get up to see what’s wrong with the child but Mr. Melrose embarks on a lecture on not mollycoddling him. Speaking to his mother and his wife, my father would say, “the two of you keep putting things into this boy’s head and he’s going to think he’s special.” As opposed to interrupting, undermining and ridiculing at every opportunity. The perfect recipe for raising a balanced, confident child – who doesn’t, since the age of nine, go to bed every night hoping never to wake up the next morning. In the end Mrs. Melrose doesn’t leave the table. Neither did my mother. Ever.

The performances are sheer brilliance. It’s now me who wants to get up. Who needs to get up. To step away from the television and just take a breath. My legs feel slightly wobbly. Too much baclofen? Who cares, it’s working. I don’t drink more than two glasses of wine per evening. Okay, perhaps three and a glass of port sometimes as well, but I’m working on it. This is tremendous progress.

I walk into the hall. It’ s beautiful. Chequered floors, William and Mary dresser, gilt mirrors, Sèvres porcelain, tapestries. Beautiful, and if everything is beautiful, everything is fine. That is the way of my world. I imagine that was also the way of Kate Spade’s world and that didn’t turn out too well, did it? But I’m sticking to it. Here are some of my beautiful pink roses.

So pink, so beautiful and so many. L’embarras des roses. An embarrassment of roses.

It’s terrible that childhood is such a short part of our lives, but can ruin all the rest. And this is only episode two. By the end I’ll be in pieces. I think it’s good for me to watch it, though. Perspective is always good. Even terrible things like the Spade or Bourdain deaths can have a positive effect because they help, depressives in particular, re-calibrate our rationalizations. All too often we spend time assigning blame to the self. I’m not successful enough, attractive enough, kind enough, talented enough (or at all, in my case) – and those become cycles of self-loathing and self-recrimination. And then two people who are at the top of everything feel they can’t go on. And then you just have to stop for a second and reconsider how you see your place in the world.

La Pradera also died last week. In her 90’s. So I leave you with her singing in 1972.

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71 comments on “An Evening with Patrick Melrose or why the worse thing that ever happened to me was that I wasn’t an orphan.”

The sad thing is that when we proselytize of children, cultural or religiously, we actually get the children to take over the administration of their own abuse. I wish we all allowed our children to grow up loved without asking to make any life identification decisions along the way. Encourage them to ask questions and think about answers but not tell them what “the answers” are (or we think they are).

I know that we all are just doing the best we can but too often that is not good enough and we spend so little effort on helping people understand what their role as a parent is.

“One of my father’s favourite lines was “this boy’s problem is he wasn’t beaten enough.” ” Sounds like we had the same father, only, unlike you, I was beaten physically, along with all the other lovely “stuff” of constant abuse. Leaves quite the impression, eh? to this day, I suffer greatly from the 20 years of it I endured. We need to move away from the model of having children automatically, and move toward, perhaps, requiring those who want to have kids to undergo a psychic evaluation first. It would do the world much good, I believe.

Absolutely. To THIS day, I’m 54, I struggle deeply with the “it was all my fault”, thought. Cognitively, I know better, but on a deep emotional level, you know, the kind that form when we’re tiny kids, I hear internal “voices” saying, “It’s all YOU, pal! And you know it!” Kinda sucks.

It does. And I think it creates a sort of brain malfunction to which there’s no real solution. As a crude analogy, our rat terrier, Rudy, was starved and beaten when he was very young, and that has informed most of his reactions since even though he’s not starving or being beaten any more.

Indeed. It’s like the horse that’s been chained to a fence for years. Take the chain off, and it stays by the fence, still. Pretty much impossible to change those early brain patterns and internal thought processes. Humans can learn WHY they feel as they do and do the best they can to live with it, but our formative years are forever a huge part of us, like it or not. I look at it like learning to live with a limb that’s been violently removed. You learn to live with the limp, but the limb is never growing back.

So many people put such a high priority on what they think, enforcement becomes the norm to everything that doesn’t matter in life at all. My mother was a wreck when we were little (she did grow out of it into a beautiful person) but our saving grace as children was living in the country we spent most of our time outside and away from parenting. She was the ultimate free-range parent, and is proof that parenting is overrated. Each of us found our way into the lives we loved. One of my older brothers still suffers a bit from abuse, and he is the only one clinging to the religion that ruined him in the first place.

Brilliant, heart-rending series. Have watched all but the last episode. I’m so sorry that your parents were/are the way they were/are. I was lucky to have had pretty good parents and to have raised two adopted kids from birth who have become very loving parents of their respective two-year-old daughters. This latter fact gives me the greatest joy and is the best antidote to my occasional dark nights of the “soul”/ self-doubt.

I love everything about it. How they manage to condense that entire trilogy into just a few episodes is amazing. All the actors are just wonderful. And the colours and the furniture – it perfectly captures the mood of the time.
Congratulations on your accomplishment! Two adoptions + grandchildren isn’t a bad record 😉

Pasta con le sarde, boy that must be a salty dish. Must take a day to get the odor out of your breath and clothes (if you make it at home). Sounds tasty though.

Childhood, if you’re lucky, you get 1 out of 10 good memories. 1 out of 2 and you’re blessed, 1 out of 20 and you’re cursed. Modern life is a hellscape for children. I wish I’d been born a hunter gatherer.

I wish I could leave a stronger emotion than Like. I also wish that I could hug you and cry for a bit — it sounds like you’re dealing with similar things to what I am right now, and I always try to handle my traumas alone because ‘No one understands’. But maybe you do. <3.

I think there are probably many of us out there. All used to handling it alone and hiding it. The silence makes it less real, in a way. Once it’s out in the open it’s like being officially cast in a role we never wanted in the first place. It compounds the pain by adding embarrassment to the equation.

‘…it’s like being officially cast in a role we never wanted in the first place.” This happened to me when I was cast as Maria in West Side Story. Didn’t really want the role, but I buckled up and did the best I could.

Coming from a family background of huge abuse on all fronts, I understand more than the average bear. Yet I think, in order to claim our lives fully, we must release the hold the past has on us. What helped me tremendously was to realize, and it took most of my life to get there, that my parents were just lost to themselves; just two wounded people trying to – what? Set right, through their own parental experiences perhaps, the wrong actions of their own parents? Yet when the pressure was on, they reverted, as people are wont to do, to the lowest common denominator; to their own primal woundedness. In short, here were two kids – not the archetypal Mother and Father I wish they had been – that every child expects parents to be – ill-suited to one another and to the process of growth and maturity it takes to raise healthy, happy children in the face of life’s demands.

Seeing them thus has allowed me to forgive what I could not for most of my life until my fifties. I cannot tell you how liberating such forgiveness can be. But we are all different, and some are more invested in the cycle of pain and its subsequent drama. No harm, no fault. Just sharing what I have learned. Aloha, Pink.

I’m not sure I completely understand the inner workings of forgiveness. Years ago I remember reading something in line with what you’re saying – that forgiveness is about understanding that things could not have been different because people are limited by what they know and their own abilities. I do get that. But where does one go from there?

It’s a process, ultimately leading to freeing up a ton of energy once bound up in wishing the past had been different than it was. When it’s impossible to change it. Sometimes relationships change, and because we have changed our fixed opinions about the others, we allow them to feel more vulnerable, often leading to a deep contrition on their part. Which can be so healing. Then again, most never get there. People like to hold fast to their stories. Pain can fuel their outrage. An old saying. trite but true, is that this is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other/s to die. We truly hurt ourselves the most. ❤️

It wasn’t that reductionistic. My forgiveness evolved over time. It just allowed me to see my parents as simply the flawed humans that we all are in one form or another. I cannot condone the abuse, but given their own histories, I can understand the pattern better. It has, if there is a conclusion here, enlarged my understanding of human nature and broadened my own compassionate nature. I still use the term idiot far too frequently, so I have my own character flaws. But when my country chooses another political course of action than reversing any and all ecological protections and human rights issues, maybe that word will evaporate from my vocabulary. No end in sight at present though. 😔

Very interesting. I think I understand how my parents became who they are. And particularly how difficult my grandparents were – wartime generation and all that baggage. I suppose my sticking point is on the(ir) decision to have children.

Mine as well with my parents! My mother really didn’t like kids at all! But I think my father, having been orphaned as a baby and through age 12 or so? definitely wanted to have the family he never had and “do it over,” but he just didn’t have the mental/emotional tools unfortunately.

It’s good you’re getting some perspective on your parents, because there’s no telling why many people have kids, honest to God. Hormones are incredibly impactful at that age. Humans breed like rats in my opinion, often with total disregard for any common sense whatsoever. Such is our indefatigable species!

Also given the wartime generation you mentioned, I think having a male heir was still in the forefront of many minds back in those days. Carrying on the family name and all that. 😘

Yes. There’s also a dark side to that in very patriarchal societies (religious, military or even just Mediterranean/Latin) which is pride/honour in reproduction. A celebration of virility and all that.

Wonderful post – although it was very painful to read your experiences!! I feel very fortunate to have the parents I (still) have. My mother did suffer some of the abuse you experienced, in her childhood. My grandfather never wanted children, and ended up with eight, and he was horrible to them all. My grandmother tried her best to protect her children, but didn’t always succeed. Somehow, my mother either made a conscious effort not to repeat any of the abuse that was inflicted on her, or perhaps she has just inherited her mother’s personal traits. Whatever the case, I always felt loved and cherished. The more people I meet, the more I realise that this is not to be taken for granted!!

Definitely not to be taken for granted! Especially considering what the world was like just 40/50/60 years ago – when children were essentially property. Expected to obey, be silent, and *grateful* for not being beaten.

I had a teacher in third year (I was nine years old) who was ‘old school’ and still thought that it was acceptable to hit children in class, with a ruler, or with the knuckles of his fist as he was passing … I never did tell my parents at the time, but now I’m sure my mother would have kicked up a stink! I have to add that I was not a regular ‘tartget’ for that teacher…. And there were other teachers who were far worse!

I’d like to think that I am a person with empathy, that for the most part I can visualize myself in the shoes of another, but I have to admit I really just don’t understand. It’s just like the occasionalr writes, “I always try to handle my traumas alone because ‘No one understands’. But maybe you do. <3." She's right I do not understand and that is kind of annoying, that on this issue I have so much trouble empathizing. I care, I care deeply when anyone I know (and even ppl I don't know) are suffering. My problem is I can't figure out why they are suffering.

You seem to me to ably psychoanalyze yourself, you can see yourself from the outside, it's not like you are unaware of the issues you have, you are hyper aware, and you know WHY you are the way you are. What I don't understand is, why with this knowledge, why you are unable to get over it, push it aside and carry on having a happy & fulfilling life? That is the part I don't get, and not just you either, but anybody who is never able to overcome childhood trauma,the people who take their own lives is another example.

I know this is a defect in me, it's just like occasionalr writes, "I always try to handle my traumas alone because ‘No one understands’. To a certain degree I can see how severe childhood trauma, a touch of that can stay with you your whole life but why does it stay with you day in and day out? The one thing you have going for you (among others) is that you have Mike, and he has you. Imagine what your life would be like without him. Thanks to all for sharing, your stories remind me just how fortunate my life has been. I've been lucky, not everybody is.

As I say in a comment above with the dog example, I imagine it works in the very shaping of the mind. To deal with intense, or to use your word, traumatic situations, the mind creates various mechanisms. Some to deal with whatever it was that happened and others to make sure the situation is never repeated. Hyper-awareness is part of that. The being on guard. Or for example, in the case of a person who was raped, not liking to be touched. This is both physical and psychological.
Our dog who was starved and beaten will not pass up any opportunity to eat, and if you ever raise your hand (even to get something off a shelf) he’ll wince. Even though those threats are no longer present. His brain says those are plausible risks. Have you heard of the Tetris Effect?

It’s the part of the brain called the amygdala. It ‘learns’ danger signals to protect you from harm, but unlearning them is almost impossible. Plus childhood is the time when you are socialised. Everything you learn in later life is filtered and layered on top of that childhood conditioning.

My childhood left me convinced that the only way I could be loved was by pleasing people. It’s a small thing, yet it’s had an effect on every relationship I’ve ever had. -shrug-
“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”
Apparently everyone has used that quote from Aristotle to the Jesuits, but it’s true. We /mold/ our children by what we do…and by what we don’t do. Getting it completely right is impossible. The best we can hope for is that it’s done with love.

Absolutely! And it goes much deeper than most people imagine. Everything, without exception, is moulded at that point. It’s when we learn techniques to get what we want/need and avoid what causes pain/harm – which is what you’re describing about pleasing people. That’s my default as well; although my backup is aggression.

The brain, as a physical organ, is also developing and growing at that time (childhood). Our internal self-image is formed and created by the input our brains are receiving from outside sources–our immediate caregivers. If those caregivers are neglectful and/or abusive shit-heals, the physical and psychological damage that is caused to our developing brain is not something we can simply “will” away at a later time. EVERYTHING else we are is built on top of that original house. With proper help and care from qualified professionals, after the damage is done, people can, with varying degrees, learn to live with this large psychological “limp.” But the damage caused by it can’t simply be “willed” away any more than a lost limb can be “willed” to re-grow. I’ve worked and communicated with abuse survivors for decades now. Many people simply do not survive it. I knew a woman who’d been repeatedly raped by an uncle from the age of 5 til she was 17. You simply do not “will” away the damage from such abuse, nor will simply “forgiving” the adult rapist make everything “OK”. believe me, it takes far more than just forgiving “Uncle Billy” to heal. Many, many never do heal. Not fully. How could you? This is not something I comment on often as it is too close to home for me, but, I thought I’d comment here as it seemed appropriate. $Amen$

You are so right about the want/need. Dad never smacked me but he was a real authoritarian – and I adored him. The one time I remember ‘sneaking behind his back’ was to watch a fun tv show instead of an instructive one. He caught me out, of course, and refused to speak to me for a week. On the other hand, he taught me to be a critical thinker and was the reason I grew up knowing I was smart. Not lovable, but smarter than your average bear. 🙂

It’s a really fascinating thing. I was discussing this phenomena with a friend of mine who’s a psychiatrist the other day and she pointed out how whenever another friend of ours asks for something she uses a “little” voice. Most likely because when she was a child that worked best with her parents who must have thought it was cute. And here she is in her 50’s still doing it. The interactive model in Mike’s family was devil’s advocacy. One person proposed an idea and the others would analyse the merits and demerits – so that’s how he approaches any information presented to him (which is EXHAUSTING for me…)

Hah! Mike and I are very much alike then. 🙂
As for the childlike behaviour, yes. I consciously became my own person as I aged, but it wasn’t until I had to care for Dad that the ‘power balance’ shifted. He became sweetly childlike with mild dementia. I became the mother figure. I suppose it was kind of liberating in one sense, but I’ve often wondered what life might have been like if I’d been born more ‘rebellious’. -shrug-
Thing is, I like the person I’ve become. I like the person you’ve become too. -hugs-

I’ve been thinking of this all day. I really thought about what you said and what you described and I have to admit it is darned depressing. Basically what you are saying is that children who experience regular & daily trauma, they get like brain damaged, same thing as getting hit in the head with a hammer, it damages their physical brain. Their brain forms irregularly and into adulthood they still have that damaged brain.

Thinking of it this way is so depressing, it’s like your fate is sealed. As long as you have breath I always think there is hope, but you are telling me there is no hope, your fate is sealed because of your life growing up. I’m an optimistic person, for me the glass is always half full, so what you describe is like a gut kick. I really don’t want to believe you, or for this to be true. I want to think that with professional help and great effort you and everyone can get out from under most of it, but everybody here is saying no, it stays with you. That’s damned depressing.

I used to think I was maybe a little bit shallow because I spend very little time in self reflection and maybe I would be a better person if I did a little bit of that, but honestly I hardly ever do that. You know we have all had disappointments in life, we have all made our own share of mistakes, my parents were good but they were not perfect no parents are, I can’t imagine what life would be like if you spend lots of time reflecting back on bad memories. I don’t know why you can’t just push those thoughts aside and carry on, it must be like you say, brain damage. You are just always going to be like this, the brain was injured and it never properly healed. I’m getting closer to understanding, it’s just very hard for me to accept the finality of it all. I’m getting there though. It’s hard for a glass half full person to accept the finality of it all.

I spent years having endless discussions about this with my therapist. Where exactly is the real illusion or delusion? Is the glass half full not wishful thinking? We like to think of a just world, a good world – but reality is it’s neither. The vast majority of people on this planet lead lives of hardship; they experience war, disease, hunger and violence. Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. How many women in the world were raped in the time it took me to type this? In America alone someone is sexually assaulted every 90 seconds. How full should a glass really be?

i very much grew up in a family similar to Mike’s. I don’t understand why that is exhausting, this is normal. Ideas/issues/proposals are discussed on their merits, you look at the pros, the cons, and make a decision. That is not exhausting Pink, it really isn’t.

I’m feel sad now and wishing I could send small you a hug. One of the sons has a friend who lives in a less than pleasant home so I make sure that person comes over a few nights a week to hang out and have dinner. It doesn’t help what is going on over there but they get to have a break in a place without accusations and belittling, just laughter, conversation, and a full stomach, then I drop them off at home late enough to be able to go straight to bed. I am INFURIATED by the parenting but know that anything I might say or do will only make matters worse.

I agree that people shouldn’t just default to having children because, in my opinion, most people are assholes and they shouldn’t be allowed to inflict their assholiness onto children who don’t have any defences against it. *folds arms angrily*|

A place to escape to helps – A LOT. I spent tons of time escaping. Forging travel permissions and getting on aeroplanes long before the Australian boy did it 😀 I even transferred myself to a different school once. That was *really* hard, also quite impossible to hide…

It’s good to hear an escape helps. I have noticed a change in this person over the last few months, the other day even having an opinion on a controversial subject we were all discussing instead of remaining quiet. The conversation rolled on but inside I was madly high-fiving myself. 😂

Now imagining you spending days gallivanting about distant locations while the adults back home are all sure someone else had responsibility for your whereabouts. What was your most successful escape?

Transferring yourself to a differently school is extremely impressive. Were you caught immediately, or was their a period of time when you got away with leaving the house in a different uniform without a parent having any idea something had changed.

My most extreme escape was from the US to see my French grandmother, confident she would save me… Didn’t quite work out as my parents were, of course, the result of the systems they were raised in.
The school thing was found out on the day I gave the address of the new school. Also didn’t work out. It turns out that going to a normal school with normal people doesn’t turn one into a normal person. So after a semester I admitted defeat and went back 😀

Ya know you were really a strong willed child, and very creative. You had a lot of audacity. It seems like the pull of what you wanted was stronger than the risk of the parental repercussions, or perhaps there weren’t any parental repercussions. How did you get the money to fly off to France? A lot of kids probably wouldn’t mind sneaking off to France but where to find the money?

There were tons of repercussions! It was all repercussions 🙂 But I guess I decided that as things were difficult anyway, I might as well do what I want along the way. In my father’s family, all expenses were organised through a woman named Augusta that worked for my grandfather’s company. Whenever one wanted/needed something one called her. School tuition, uniforms, tennis racket, dentist – whatever it was, I’d call Augusta and she’d get the money to me. I was expected to organise all those things myself.

I so feel many parents ruin children’s lives. Their expectations of children throughout their lives is often so misguided. I have huge cases full of of crap from mine and at 50 I am only just starting to deal with it. Very sad ‘re Bourdain. Creative talent sometimes raises demons within or maybe they stem from childhood trauma. I am lucky now to have a very understanding husband and we are working through my insecurities. But some days are difficult and my mother is a person I wish I wasn’t related to.

Your post is a subject me and husband discuss a lot. I recently read a book about brain changes created by childhood trauma or abuse and in my case extreme bullying. Reprogramming is difficult and often impossible. You really shelve a lot of it in your brains attic space and trip over it on your next clear out. A sharp scalpel to remove some memories might be the best solution. Getting over it somehow isn’t the way our brains deal with these incidents..looking into why in my quest to clean out my head.

I agree. I am having huge issues with my mother. Only child means I am in the firing line. Busy sure helps and dare I say being a bit selfish. But it’s hard as one trigger and the memories fill your brain as if it was just yesterday. Decorating is therapy and this week I am waxing my French barn beams. I will be off grid to annoying people!